Riffhaus Advent Calendar
Hi, I’m Sandra. This is Riffhaus.
I turn music into wearable worlds.
I listen for the feeling inside a song — the woman behind it, her intention, her rhythm. I design from that place. I’m an empath.
For Advent, I wanted to invite you into this process.
Each day, one song becomes one garment.
Fashion as feeling. Listening as form.
You can read this calendar straight through, or wander door by door — whatever feels right.
Say hi — it truly makes my day. Sandra@riffhaus.com
December 24, 2025 - Our Last Door. And it's GLORIA!
On caret marks, beginnings, and why Patti Smith closes this Advent - picked by Laura who is an artist herself.
It was a meeting of the minds and heart that Laura picked Patti Smith for the last day of this Advent because she has always felt less like an ending and more like a starting point.
Just Kids is one of those books in our house that never really leaves circulation. It’s dog-eared, re-read, picked up at random. It’s also the name of our Wi-Fi — not ironically, not nostalgically, but as a quiet marker of values: friendship, making, believing in the work before it’s validated.
For the final riff, I chose GLORIA.
Not because it’s tidy, but because it isn’t.
GLORIA opens with a declaration. It’s Patti Smith insisting on presence before permission. Language becomes posture. Voice becomes stance. It’s not about polish — it’s about arrival.
The piece for 24/24 is called CARET.
The caret is a writer’s symbol. It’s the mark you use when something important was left out. It means: this belongs here. Insert this. Begin again.
That symbol felt like the right way to close an Advent built on riffs — on fragments, interpretations, emotional echoes. A caret doesn’t end a sentence. It interrupts one. It insists that meaning is still being formed.
This riff was picked by Laura, and it’s knitted to order in merino wool — soft, restrained, and graphic in the way language can be when it’s reduced to its essentials. There’s no ornament here. No explanation built into the object. Just a mark of authorship.
That feels right for Patti.
Early Schiaparelli understood that symbols didn’t need to be subtle to be serious. Patti Smith understood that you didn’t need to wait to be invited to speak. Both trusted the intelligence of the viewer — the reader, the listener, the wearer.
This piece isn’t meant to feel finished. It’s meant to feel like a placeholder for something you’re still writing.
This is the last day of the Advent, but not a conclusion. More like a pause. A caret in time.
Thank you for being here — for following along, collecting, watching these riffs unfold. This project only works because it’s shared.
Light doesn’t rush.It inserts itself where it’s needed.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 23, 2025
Eblouie par la nuit — A riff on Zaz
RAIN began with an image that wouldn’t leave me alone.
A woman sits on a green bench in the rain. Cars pass behind her. The street reflects light. She isn’t posing. She isn’t escaping. She’s just there. Highly recommend watching her official clip to feel what this riff is based on.
That feeling — stillness inside motion — became the core of this piece.
The RAIN dress is intentionally simple: a halterneck, an open back, a long fluid line. It doesn’t shape the body so much as follow it. The silk is cool and smooth, with a soft drape that moves easily and never feels restrictive. It’s the kind of fabric you notice when you first put it on — and then stop thinking about entirely.
The print is blurred and atmospheric, like rain on stone or headlights seen through mist. Nothing literal. Nothing sharp. Just suggestion.
This riff is inspired by Zaz, and by a particular idea of Paris — not the postcard version, but the lived one. Rainy streets. Quiet strength. Music that feels worn in rather than polished.
RAIN isn’t meant for performance.It’s meant for walking slowly.For sitting still.For letting a moment stretch longer than planned.
As the second-to-last day of the Riffhaus Advent, this piece is a pause — a breath before the end.
Then… i felt like she needed to be warmed up and couldn't help it but make a cozy wearable shawl
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 22, 2025
Le temps d’amour lives in that space.Not the drama of love beginning or ending — but the moment when love exists, quietly, while life continues around it.
For this riff, I kept returning to images of Françoise walking through Paris by herself. Not posing. Not performing. Just moving. That, to me, is early female emancipation: the confidence to take up space without explanation.
The shirt follows that logic.
The print holds two tonal states — light and shadow — placed side by side. Not before and after. Not good and bad. Just coexistence. Like a woman who contains softness and resolve at the same time.
Le temps d’amour lives in that space.Not the drama of love beginning or ending — but the moment when love exists, quietly, while life continues around it.
For this riff, I kept returning to images of Françoise walking through Paris by herself. Not posing. Not performing. Just moving. That, to me, is early female emancipation: the confidence to take up space without explanation.
The shirt follows that logic.
The print holds two tonal states — light and shadow — placed side by side. Not before and after. Not good and bad. Just coexistence. Like a woman who contains softness and resolve at the same time.
The silhouette is intentionally understated. Long. Borrowed from menswear. Adaptable. It can be buttoned all the way up or worn open, tucked or loose. The point isn’t the styling — it’s the choice.
I didn’t want this piece to feel nostalgic.I wanted it to feel usable. Present. A garment for leaving the house alone and trusting yourself to return changed, even slightly.
That’s le temps d’amour to me:the time when you begin to belong to yourself.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 21, 2025 — Running Away. Door 21
The Muse: Cate Le Bon
Riff on Running Away - picked by Sarah
Cate Le Bon, Winter Solstice, and the Art of Becoming
There are artists whose work feels less like a statement and more like a state of being. Cate Le Bon is one of them.
The woman who picked this riff described her music as an epiphany — a transformation taking place, paired with a glance backward and a smirk toward what’s coming next. That felt exactly right. Cate’s music lives in duality: warm and cold, night and dawn, plea and demand. You don’t enter it cleanly. You move sideways into it.
This riff was built around that idea.
The hazmat suit started as a practical form — protective, technical, almost anonymous. But once worn, it became something else entirely. The body bends. The spine curves. The movement is fluid, deliberate, slightly wrong.
Not a pose — a transition.
The back print is where the story lives. Faces dissolve into organic lines, as if memory itself is rearranging. It’s not centered. It’s not neat. It’s something carried, not displayed.
It's like a performance still rather than a fashion image — low light, bio-lab glow, a body mid-motion.
Winter solstice felt like the right moment for this riff. The longest night. The quiet shift toward light. Cate’s music exists exactly there — in that strange, familiar space where transformation happens before you can name it.
Thank you, Sarah - for all your support!
I connected with Sarah via Instagram - one day I got a follow - the profile picture PONYO, a favorite in our house. So I said "Hi!" - we chatted right away, then scheduled a video call I recorded and wanted to share to explain my riff process, the call went over 2 hours because we loved talking. The video recording? Still lost in some sort of version issue with Zoom. We ll have to do that again.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 20, 2025 — Phoebe knows the end, so do I . Door 20
The Muse: Phoebe Bridgers
Riff on I Know the End — picked by London
London talked about fire escapes. The picture of the door before it opened.
About how they aren’t elegant or chosen — they’re used when something has already gone wrong. Escape not as freedom, but as inevitability. The calm beginning of I Know the End, and the way it eventually collapses into something unhinged.
That framing unlocked the form for this riff.
But when I sat with the song — and with the coat — what I saw wasn’t doors or stairwells.
I saw ghosts.
Not horror-movie ghosts. Not jump scares. The quieter kind. The kind that linger. The kind you carry with you when you leave a place, a version of yourself, a life that no longer fits. The kind that don’t haunt you — they accompany you.
That’s what became the print.
Layered, translucent figures drifting through smoke and fabric. Repeating, overlapping, never fully solid. Like memories that refuse to stay behind. Like versions of yourself you don’t get to kill off cleanly.
London’s idea of the coat as a thing you grab when fleeing — a portable shelter — feels right. And this coat isn’t just protection from the outside. It’s protection for everything you’re carrying inside. So the inside is soft fleece.
Either way, we’re not alone / I’ll find a new place to be from.
Some escapes are loud.
Some are quiet.
Some happen with ghosts still holding on.
This one does.
Watch the music video [also linked in the top], it is a slow build, one with an incredible ending. It's a master piece.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 19, 2025 — Dazzle - SPECTACLE. Door 19
The Muse: Siouxsie Sioux
Riff on Dazzle — picked by Emmy
DAZZLE — on becoming unreadable
There are moments when something clicks so cleanly it feels unreal.
This riff started with Dazzle by Siouxsie & The Banshees — a song that isn’t about rebellion as noise, but about surrendering to spectacle. About becoming so visually and emotionally intense that you can no longer be easily read, categorized, or controlled.
Siouxsie has always understood this power. She didn’t fight for attention — she constructed a stage. Precision, glamour, performance, excess. Beauty turned up past legibility. You can look, but you won’t fully access.
That’s what Dazzle is doing.
For this riff, I wanted to push that idea as far as I could without losing control. Not punk chaos. Not darkness for its own sake. Something cinematic. Something overwhelming but deliberate.
The bomber became the right object. Silk satin as surface. Movement as meaning. A pattern that refuses a focal point, refracts light, interferes with perception. Too much signal at once. No clear read.
Then something else happened.
When we tested the piece in motion — a slow 360-degree turn, the woman transforming as she rotates — it suddenly felt alive. Hair shifting. Makeup intensifying. The jacket catching light differently at every angle. Not a costume change. A chosen transformation.
Watching it back, it felt like a reminder of why I started Riffhaus in the first place.
Sometimes you don’t need to explain who you are. Sometimes you let the spectacle do the work.
This riff is about that moment — when clarity dissolves, and power comes from being unreadable.
That’s Dazzle.
— Sandra
December 18, 2025 — Back at The Start. Door 18
The Muse: Patty Griffin
Riff on Back at the Start — picked by Traci
Some songs don’t arrive loudly.
They just sit with you.
Back at the Start is one of those songs. Patty Griffin wrote it like a quiet truth you only realize after you’ve already lived it — love, loss, tenderness, the strange gentleness of beginning again.
This riff started with that feeling.
I kept thinking about the idea of carrying your inner world on your back. Not as armor. Not as display. But as something growing there slowly — unseen by you, visible to everyone else.
The knit shows a woman’s silhouette filled with flowers. Not embroidered. Not applied. Knitted directly into the fabric, the way memory weaves itself into us without asking.
I imagined us being in Maine, where she grew up, close to the water, because this is a coastal song. A bird pauses. A hand opens. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is styled too hard. The moment matters more than the pose.
This piece isn’t about nostalgia.
It’s about returning — softer, changed, still open.
That’s what Back at the Start sounds like to me.
And this is what it looks like.
Who is Patty Griffin?
Patty Griffin is an American singer-songwriter known for writing songs that feel quietly devastating — emotionally precise, never overworked. Her music lives in the folk / Americana world, but what sets her apart is restraint. She doesn’t push the feeling. She trusts it.
She’s an artist musicians love — covered by everyone from Emmylou Harris to Linda Ronstadt — and often described as a writer’s writer: someone who says the thing without dressing it up.
About Back at the Start
Back at the Start is the opening track and lead single from Patty Griffin’s 2025 album Crown of Roses. The song sets the emotional tone for the entire record — reflective, grounded, and quietly resolute.
Crown of Roses is a meditation on endurance, tenderness, and the ways we keep going without hardening. In Back at the Start, Griffin writes about beginning again not as a reset, but as a return — carrying memory, grief, and love forward with more awareness than before.
It’s a song about starting over without erasing what came before.
That feeling — of softness earned, not naïveté — is what shaped this riff.
That’s the heart of this riff.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 17, 2025 — Victoria Secret. Door 17
The Muse: JAX
Riff on Victoria's Secret — picked by Nadia
Victoria’s Secret was never really a secret.
It was a fantasy sold loudly, repeatedly, to women who already had bodies.
This riff starts there — but it doesn’t stay there.
JAX wrote a song that refuses the performance. It talks about money, control, shame, motherhood, anger — all the things lingerie ads never wanted you to name. The line that stuck with me most was about who gets rich off whose body. Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.
So we didn’t make angels.
We made aftermath.
The body is real.
The stance is casual.
The wings — when they appear — are heavy, cracked, or already on the ground.
This isn’t seduction.
It’s ownership.
The JAX bandeau and boyshorts are intentionally simple. They don’t sculpt, lift, disguise, or perform. They sit on the body the way underwear actually does — worn, lived-in, unremarkable in the best way. The print carries the mythology. The body carries the truth.
This is not a comeback.
It’s not empowerment theater.
It’s a woman standing in what remains once the fantasy stops working.
That’s the secret.
This is door 17 - 7 more to go!
—
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 16, 2025 —Light On. Door 16
The Muse: Maggie Rogers
Riff on Light On — picked by Emma
Some songs don’t arrive fully formed.
They move.
Light On lives in that in-between space — between staying and going, between night and morning, between thinking and doing. It’s a song about keeping something lit when everything else goes dark.
This riff was built around that feeling.
The scarf came first. We made it unusually long on purpose. Not for drama, but for movement — something that could wrap and unwrap, trail and gather, never quite settle. The needle-transfer knit repeats in narrow vertical columns, quiet but architectural, like road lines slipping past in the dark kit with extra fine merino wool.
The tote followed naturally. A bag for when you don’t pack carefully — you just pack. It’s oversized, soft-structured, meant to be filled without planning. Not a destination bag. A leaving one.
The editorial lives at blue hour in rural Oregon. A white hatchback. Interior light on. Warmth against cold. The car becomes a container — for sleep, for thought, for whatever you’re carrying forward.
This riff isn’t about escape.
It’s about momentum.
About the moment you realize you’re already in motion — and you leave the light on anyway.
—
Light On is part of the Riffhaus Advent Calendar: 24 riffs, 24 days, each pulled from the emotional world of a woman and a song.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 15, 2025 — My head is a Jungle. Door 15
The Muse: Emma Louise
Riff on Jungle — picked by Annie Elise
The first time I heard Jungle, my mind flooded with green.
Dense leaves. Heat. Color. A kind of emotional overgrowth.
It took many listens before I realized that wasn’t what she meant at all.
Only after sitting with the song — and then seeing Emma Louise’s visual world — did it click: Jungle isn’t about abundance. It’s about mapping.
About curiosity. About discovering connections. About drawing lines where none existed before.
This riff is built on that quiet shift.
The print begins as cartography — not literal maps, but hand-drawn paths that feel tentative, human, searching. Lines that wander, intersect, hesitate. Like thoughts. Like emotional routes forming in real time.
This song was chosen by very talented musician Annie Elise. I befriended her on Instagram and its been great to follow her journey, she just brought out out a new single called Ardmore! She described Emma Louise perfectly:
Her voice is so deeply human, but her recent electronic collaboration with Flume is hard-hitting and boundary-pushing. How can a voice be so gentle and soft but hit so hard? There is so much raw beauty in this world — perfection in imperfection and authenticity. She inspires me greatly.
That paradox — softness with force — is what guided the garment.
The silhouette is loose, unarmored, almost domestic.
The fabric feels like something you live in while thinking, sketching, discovering.
Fashion as a companion to curiosity — not a statement, not a performance.
This is why I riff.
Because music changes when you let it sit with you.
And sometimes what looks like a jungle is actually a map — waiting to be drawn.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 14, 2025 — Light. Door 14
The Muse: Melanie Martinez
Riff on Light Shower — picked by Virgil
Melanie Martinez has always lived slightly outside of time.
Her work moves through childhood, fantasy, and bodily transformation not as nostalgia, but as a way of telling the truth sideways. She builds worlds where softness is strange, where innocence carries weight, and where becoming something else is often the point.
“Light Shower” is one of her quietest songs.
No spectacle. No edge. Just devotion.
It’s a love song, but not the kind that burns. It’s about love as something that falls gently — like rain, like light — and stays. Love that doesn’t rush you. Love that lets you be slow. Love that feels safe enough to soften inside.
In the Light Shower video, Melanie appears as a snail — a creature that moves at its own pace, carries its home, and leaves a trace simply by existing. It’s not a joke. It’s not cute. It’s a metaphor for endurance.
That’s where this piece begins.
The snail on this sweater isn’t a character. It’s a witness.
It looks back at you because it’s still here.
It moves slowly because it carries everything.
It leaves a mark not by force, but by persistence.
This riff is about choosing gentleness in a world that rewards speed. About trusting softness as a form of strength. About letting yourself arrive when you arrive.
Light doesn’t rush.
Neither do you.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 13, 2025 — Every Day. Door 13
The Muse: Paris Paloma
Riff on Labour — picked by Sofia
Some work doesn’t end.
It just changes rooms.
Recommend watching her music video. Emotional torture. 24/7 baby machine - all day every day...
Today’s riff is about repetition — the quiet, constant labour that holds everything else together.
Worn without performance.
Made to last.
After putting the dress together I still had an itch. Apron... market tote. The carry all, every day 24/7.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 12, 2025 — GHOST. Door 12
The Muse: Bodyimage
Riff on The Ghost and The Father — picked by Gabriela
Some riffs arrive fully formed.
This one fractured.
Bodyimage makes music that feels like it’s happening inside the body — not metaphorically, but physically. Pulse, pressure, distortion. Songs that don’t sit on the skin; they move under it. When I started working on this riff, I thought I was designing one dress.
I was wrong.
What came out instead were two dresses, each holding a different truth of the same song.
Dress I: The Anatomical One
This version doesn’t ask permission.
It’s built around skeletal rhythm lines, ghostly distortions, almost like a medical scan that’s been dragged through a broken signal. It reads as anatomical without being literal — a body reduced to structure, tempo, grid.
This dress is about exposure without softness.
The body as system.
The body as architecture.
The body as something seen clearly, maybe too clearly.
There’s no romance here — just presence.
Dress II: The Water One
The second dress went in the opposite direction.
Instead of bones, it holds water.
Instead of structure, it carries blur.
The distortions are still there, but they’re submerged — like sound traveling through liquid, or memory moving through sleep. It’s quieter. More spiritual. Less diagnostic. This version is about what happens after the impact, when the body absorbs rather than resists.
If the first dress is a scan, this one is a prayer.
Why Both Exist
I didn’t choose between them because the music didn’t choose either.
Bodyimage lives in that tension — between control and surrender, between knowing your body too well and losing it entirely. Making just one dress would’ve flattened that complexity. So I let the riff split.
Same source.
Same nervous system.
Two different ways of listening.
Both dresses are part of the Advent calendar because sometimes a riff doesn’t resolve — it echoes.
Happy Advent, Sandra
December 11, 2025 — Kill Me. Door 11
The Muse: Hayley Williams
Riff on Hayley Williams — picked by Megan
Some riffs arrive quietly.
Others crash in like weather.
Today’s muse came from Megan — one of my very first collectors, and someone who has shown up for every riff, every experiment, every strange little world I’ve built. When she sent me “Kill Me” by Hayley Williams, she added a line that stuck with me:
“This song feels like shedding armor we never asked to carry.”
So that’s where I began.
I pulled out the coat I’ve been tailoring for months — molten red wool, sweeping the floor in a wide ring of godets, lined in sheer blush silk that moves like breath. It’s the heaviest garment I’ve ever sewn, but somehow the most vulnerable. Perfect for a song that sits right on the edge of strength and collapse.
We set the look on a rooftop at twilight.
Rain everywhere. Neon bouncing off puddles.
Hair plastered, expression unguarded — that exhausted clarity Hayley sings from.
Underneath: a tight little striped bodycon.
On her feet: storm-proof vegan leather boots in the exact orange the collector described.
This riff is for the eldest daughters, the quiet carriers, the ones who keep going long after they’re tired.
It’s for Megan.
And it’s for anyone who has ever let their armor slip for a moment just to breathe.
12/11 — KILL ME
Shop the riff →
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 10, 2025 — Woke up in Berlin. Door 10
The Muse: Saint Sinner
Today’s muse was picked by my husband, Ian.
On our first date, years ago, he asked me about Berlin — not in a small-talk way, but in a why does that place matter to you way. I had lived there. Studied art there. Walked those streets enough times that the city stayed in my body long after I left.
“Woke Up in Berlin” isn’t about nightlife or nostalgia. It’s about the hours after. Fog still hanging. Streets half-empty. The feeling of orienting yourself again — emotionally and physically.
That’s what shaped this puffer.
The city doesn’t sit on the front. It lives on the back. The Fernsehturm appears faintly along the spine, like memory returning. Nothing loud. Nothing to explain.
It isn’t about arriving.
It’s about walking home.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 9, 2025 — Off the Deep End. Door 9
The Muse: Lady Gaga
Muse picked by Abigail
Lady Gaga is known for spectacle.
For armor.
For volume, excess, performance at full force.
But Shallow isn’t that Gaga.
This song lives in a quieter place — not the stage, but the moment just before it. The breath held. The question asked privately: Is this enough? The decision made without applause.
That contrast is what pulled me in.
The Shallow riff isn’t about wildness or disguise. It’s about fragility that doesn’t apologize. Strength that doesn’t raise its voice. A woman still soft, still uncertain — and stepping forward anyway.
That’s also Gaga.
Not the persona.
The person underneath the persona.
This bodysuit was designed to hold that tension. The print feels blurred and water-marked, like emotion settling into fabric. The fit is close, almost protective. Nothing sharp, nothing loud — just depth.
Shallow isn’t about falling apart.
It’s about choosing depth over safety.
This riff lives right there — between spectacle and self.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 8, 2025 —I see the glitter — and I know what’s underneath it. Door 8
The Muse: Audrey Nuna
Muse picked by my SIL Grace
Today’s riff started with a song.
“Golden.” I listened to it on my way to the dentist.
Not flashy. Not triumphant in the obvious way. More like self-possession.
Audrey Nuna’s “Golden” feels like arriving at a place you already knew was yours — without asking the room for permission. That feeling shaped everything in this drop.
Audrey grew up recording covers quietly, teaching herself patience before exposure. Before the high-gloss visuals and editorial control, there was discipline — learning how to hold energy instead of spilling it.
In interviews, she talks about control: creating without dilution, shaping her own world, guarding the spark that makes the work feel alive.
“Golden” carries that same discipline.
It glows without spectacle.
A sharp, fitted silhouette Gold lines that read like internal strength A Familiar carried low, steady, unflinching Koreatown at night at Woorijip— chaos orbiting calm This isn’t about being seen.
It’s about knowing.
Happy Advent, Sandra
December 7, 2025 —It's fluid- Door 7
The Muse: Christine and the Queens
Muse picked by London
Song: To Be Honest
London picked Christine and the Queens, and she picked To Be Honest.
A quiet choice. A complicated one.
Christine’s music lives in the in-between — gender, power, softness, control — never declaring, always hovering. To Be Honest feels like standing very still while the world asks you to explain yourself.
This morning, on my walk, I found a feather on the street. Black fading into gray, dissolving into white. No bird. No drama. Just the trace of something that had already moved on.
That became the riff.
Not the feather as symbol — but the feather as residue. A mark left behind. A gesture paused mid-air. The gradient in this piece shifts the same way: light folding into dark, dark releasing back into light. Nothing sharp. Nothing resolved.
This is a fluid piece — not as an identity, but as a state.
Not masculine. Not feminine. Not interested in landing.
Door 7 doesn’t ask for interpretation.
It just stays with you.
Happy Advent, Sandra
December 6, 2025 She ain’t begging for no man — Door 6
The Muse: Dolly Parton
This muse was picked by Elisza — who already has four riffs in her closet, which means a lot to me.
So this one felt heavier. I really wanted to get it right.
I struggled with the original emotional knot of Jolene: the feeling of begging another woman, or being the aloof one who already has the upper hand. I kept turning that melancholy over in my head, trying to reconcile it.
And then the question shifted.
What if she doesn’t need the man?
What if she gets Jolene — but only if she wants her?
I originally toyed with an image of men circling a desirable Jolene. But that felt wrong. So instead, the men got knitted into the sweater — absorbed into pattern and memory — and she gets to have fun instead. Horses. Freedom. Jolene.
A different ending.
A quieter power.
Happy Advent,
Sandra
December 5, 2025 Dedicated to my mom and her love of France
The Muse: Melody’s Echo Chamber
Her new album Unclouded dropped today, and it feels like opening the shutters of a sun-soaked farmhouse in Provence — hazy, pastel, and full of breathy little miracles.
If you want to listen with me while you scroll, here’s her Spotify.
Today’s riff is for my mom, who loves France in the quiet, devoted way people love places that stitch them back together. The lavender, the stone kitchens, the long roads that cut through golden fields — that’s her soul-land. I let Melody guide me there.
This dress is my translation of her dream-pop world: Psychedelic florals, soft sea-mint swirls, a little French mischief. She gets to dance along the cliffs, drive with the windows down, and end in a warm kitchen making an apple tarte.
A tiny film. A memory. A riff.
This one’s for you, Mama.
Happy Advent, Sandra
December 4, 2025 “Get your hot sauce ready”
The Muse: Noga Erez picked by Bianca
Her BPM is unreal, and the way she eats pizza? My kind of woman.
I first listened to her when I collaborated with artist and singer Bianca Cheng on the Aurora Frozen Heart riff. Then she dropped Bubbeling — and it’s epic. The line “hot sauce on my pizza” is so good. So here you go: this is my new favorite vest.
It makes me want to order pasta to a hotel in Barcelona and see her tonight. I want to see her BUBBELING!
About Noga Erez
Born in Tel Aviv, she’s one of the most inventive electronic artists of the last decade. Her music blends electronic, hip-hop, and pop, always with razor-sharp beats and socially charged lyrics. She broke out internationally with “Off the Radar” (2017) and followed with the critically acclaimed “KIDS” (2021).
Noga is known for unreal BPM control, syncopated rhythms, and performances that feel like controlled explosions. Her visuals are always high-concept, ironic, and kinetic — dancers, sharp symmetry, weird humor, and political undertones.
She’s performed on Jimmy Fallon, Glastonbury, Primavera, Lollapalooza, and every major alt-electronic stage you can name. Noga’s songs often thread themes of identity, control, media, and modern chaos — but always with a wink.
“ Bubbeling ” is her most unhinged in the best way: playful, physical, a little dirty, totally addictive. And yes — the “hot sauce on my pizza” line is now a cultural reset.
Happy Advent,
Sandra - Founder Riffhaus
December 3, 2025 “Heat haze. Quiet grief. A field that remembers.”
The Muse: Ethel Cain picked by Joe
Ethel Cain — a voice for those who grew up where the power lines hum and the road runs on far too long. This riff reaches back to the fields, the crosses, the night air thick with memory — a world where quiet pain lives just under the surface, and beauty can bloom in dust and rust.
WACO is about dust-coated nostalgia, telephone poles that looked like altars, moss creeping over wood until time forgets what was there — and a knit cardigan that carries all that weight without collapsing under it. She was picked by Joseph who I met at the Sofia Isella show at the Royale.
A riff is to fixate, fantasize and fabricate. I fixated on her love for smell goods, recommended watch here. I got to know Hayden Silas Anehdonia through this documentary I loved watching, here.
Watching the visuals of Waco, Texas - Joe's pick - I was drawn to the telephone poles and their geometry being like a cross. Hayden grew up in a trailer park so I wanted to wrap her into something warm and dedicate a smell: White Sage & Lavender.
Happy Advent
- Sandra, Founder Riffhaus
December 2, 2025 "Noise and leaving hopelessness behind."
The Muse: Imogen Heap
Imogen Heap has been a quietly revolutionary force in music and technology since the early 2000s, blurring the line between human emotion and digital sound. Born in 1977 in London, she grew up moving between classical training and self-taught experimentation, ultimately building a language of pop that feels both intimate and otherworldly. Her 2005 album Speak for Yourself became a cult touchstone—vocal stacks, glitchy harmonies, and that unmistakable sense of a woman engineering her own universe.
Long before motion sensors and tech-stage theatrics became mainstream, Heap pioneered the idea that gesture itself could be music. The Mi.Mu gloves she helped invent weren’t just instruments; they were an extension of her body—conducting, shaping, sculpting sound out of air.
Her work is threaded with longing, with clarity, with the kind of emotional precision that makes you feel like you’re hearing someone shed an old skin in real time. For this riff, I’m tapping into the Imogen who reaches through fog—soft-spoken but electrically charged—the woman who turned movement into meaning, who showed us that even the smallest gesture can pull you out of hopelessness and back into light.
I let the fog take the lead today. Sometimes the image arrives before the logic does. A hand lifts, a breath shifts, and suddenly there’s space again. This one is about the moment you decide not to stay where the darkness left you.
Happy Advent
- Sandra, Founder Riffhaus
December 1, 2025 "The whole Cake"
The Muse: Courtney Love - picked by MaryAnn
This first door cracked open like a bruise. A Collector named MaryAnn summoned Courtney Love, and the minute her name dropped into the ritual, I felt that old ache rush back in. The kind that lives under the sternum. The kind you pretend you outgrew.
This is the world of Door One: the sweet rot of girlhood, the sharp tongue of the 90s, the soft threat of wanting to be wanted. A little messy. A little holy. A little unhinged.
Here are the frames from today’s riff:
Courtney Love has been a gravitational force in alt-culture since the early ’90s, fronting Hole with a ferocity that ripped straight through the grunge era. Born in 1964, raised between Oregon and California, she survived a chaotic childhood and carved her way into music, acting, and fashion on her own terms. Live Through This (1994) became a defining album of the decade—raw, diaristic, feminist before the word got glossy. She moved through the same circles as Kurt Cobain, Kim Gordon, Patti Smith, and the riot grrrl scene, but she was always her own category: part Hollywood starlet, part gutter punk, part tragic heroine who refused to die. Her lyrics are full of hunger and ambition—wanting beauty, wanting power, wanting the whole damn cake—and that tension is exactly what gives her work its electricity. For this riff, I’m tapping into the Courtney who was loud, brilliant, and biting, the woman who demanded more from the world even when it tried to burn her down.
The cake-bag doesn’t exist in real life — it’s pure fantasy, a prop from the emotional world of the riff. The real thing you can actually hold is the shirt, the one piece from this scene that stepped out of the dream and into your hands. I COULD make the bag but it would be many many many hours... challenge me?
I didn’t try to control this one. I let it unravel. I let the ache stay. December doesn’t start soft — it starts with truth.
Happy Advent,
- Sandra, Founder Riffhaus